Everyman Bristol
At least three cocks, twice that number of full frontal ladies, literally dozens of sex-scenes in explicitly creative permutations; a Victorian lady discovering masturbation at the dinner table with a cucumber; several hundred f-words and quite a lot of cunts; suicide; very graphic depictions of surgery and dissection and an overwhelming atmosphere of Bohemian decadence.
Certificate 15, apparently. I don't know what you have to do to get an X nowadays.
I remember Alasdair Gray's Poor Things as being a novel of ideas; sort of kind of a Scottish feminist riff on Frankenstein. Not as good as Lanark, which is obviously one of the greatest novels of the last century, but better than 1982: Janine, which also involved a lot of kinky sex. Gray was an artist before he was a writer, and an obvious fan of William Blake, so his books are full of strange black and white drawings. The autobiographical figure in Lanark is described in a tabloid newspaper as The Mad Muralist. The movie doesn't try to animate Gray's pictures, which would be both impossible and pointless, but the weird visual universe of the movie -- modulating between grainy monochrome and Wes Anderson colour, with the odd Peter Greenaway-ish inter-title -- is a pretty good cinematic analogue. One sometimes has a sense that Alan Moore never quite got over the fact that he isn't Alasdair Gray.
I don't recall the novel leaning quite so heavily into steampunk as the film does: there's a delightful scene in which the main characters take a ride in a steam or petrol powered carriage, with an animated horse's head attached to the front. The head of an actual horse, removed and attached to the vehicle, I mean. There is a lot of that in the film: ducks with dogs heads waddle around the mad scientist's improbably gothic town-house. Everything is hyper-real; hyper-intense. The Paris brothel where the heroine spends rather too much of the third act seems to expand into a shabby-opulent pleasure palace. Every one of her clients is a grotesque. I don't remember that sequence going on for nearly so long in the book.
So, what's it about?
Good question. A young medical student, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) takes a job with Dr Godwin Baxter, a brilliant anatomist with a hideously deformed face (William Dafoe, naturally). Max's job is to study and record the behaviour of Bella (Emma Stone) Godwin's protege, or daughter, or mistress.
It rapidly transpires that Bella is actually Max's creation; a suicide victim retrieved from the river and brought back to life in a Universal Pictures laboratory. The details of the resurrection process is not fully revealed until quite late in the movie, but they are utterly deranged. Bella has a child's mind in an adult body, but she develops at an accelerated speed. As the movie progresses, the goes from being inarticulate, to monosyllabic, to speaking in her own strange pidgin to being an adult woman with absolutely no understanding (or possibly, far too much understanding) of Victorian manners. Stone's handling of this is nothing short of astonishing. It could have been pure farce, but she conveys to us that lines like "Hello, ugly woman with strange hair" and "Excuse me while I go and punch that baby" have emotion and interiority behind them.
There is clearly a strong element of Eliza Doolittle to the character; and a substantive dollop of Frankenstein underlying the whole story. (The modern Prometheus and the modern Pygmalion are two takes on a single theme.) Bella calls Godwin "God", and there's clearly symbolism around the idea that she was created by God and can't become an independent person until she cuts her links to her Creator. But its also the case that Frankenstein's creator was named Mary Godwin until she married Percy Byshe Shelley. Like Frankenstein's creature, Bella is an innocent who has to learn about society from the outside: a tabula rasa who we watch grow into a person. Sofa-Buddy thought that her travails recalled Shaw's Adventures of the Black Girl and Her Search For God.
Bella is all set up to marry Max until the lecherous rake Duncan Wedderbum appears on the scene. Wedderbum is played by Mark "Hulk" Ruffalo, giving the kind of performance that can only be described as "not quite as funny as it thinks it is". Wedderbum takes Bella on a cruise to Portugal, but when they are thrown off the ship (Bella having given away all of Wedderbum's money to help the poor) they end up penniless in Paris. This is when Bella takes the very long drawn out and explicit job at the brothel. Duncan ends up in a padded cell and Max takes her home. But that's not a happy ending, because we discover what God's experiment on Bella actually involved, and things take a turn for the even nastier and even more surreal.
What can one say? Like a lot of Gray's novels, Poor Things is a sprawling, erudite, witty folly, not really about any one thing. I suppose it's about sexuality in general and female sexuality in particular: why, particularly, shouldn't you have sex with whoever you feel like and talk about wanking at the supper table? And like Frankenstein it's about the growth of the spirit, a person thrust into the world trying to work out what is going on. And certainly, it's about different ways of looking at that world -- Max and Godwin's science; Duncan's hedonism; the cynicism of the two passengers Bella hooks up with on the voyage; and the rather wise pragmatism of the brothel keeper. Bella rejects them all.
It's pretty funny, although rather too many of the jokes involve saying dreadful things in posh accents. "What a pretty retard" says Max when he first sees Bella. "Let us touch one another's genital pieces" Bella tells Max after she has discovered sex. ("Why do people not do this all the time?") She tells Duncan that an elderly lady has not fucked for twenty years, and adds "I hope your use your hand between your legs to keep yourself happy." It's quite amusing but there's quite a lot of it.
A party of cinema-philes in the back row greeted every line (and every occurrence of the word "cunt") with animated and prolonged laughter, making Sofa-Buddy wonder if there was perhaps a Barbiehiemer or Rocky Horror contingent that we weren't aware of. It's definitely funny, but not as funny as all that.
But mostly, the film seems to be the pretext for a completely crazy trawl through weird imagery and grotesqueries; the sheer joy of being completely bonkers, through the eyes of a character who is quite possibly the only sane person present.
And a quite spectacular amount of shagging.
I'm Andrew.
I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.
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